Financial Watch:

ACS Awarded Shared DW System Contract by New Jersey DHS

ACS, one of the fastest-growing providers of information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, announced that it had been awarded a contract by the New Jersey Department of Human Services (DHS), Division of Medical Assistance and Health Services (DMAHS), to design and implement a Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) Shared Data Warehouse (SDW).

The New Jersey SDW represents a significant expansion of ACS' Decision Support Systems Division, and will be the first of its kind in the nation. This system will be built to manage information not only for New Jersey Medicaid, but also for NJFamily Care and other human services programs including TANF, Food Stamps, Child Care and eventually other Health and Human Services programs. ACS anticipates that it will be showcased as the most advanced comprehensive integrated Data Warehouse for Health and Human Services information available anywhere.

New Jersey has critical needs for identifying and implementing the right technology and business processes needed to effectively manage its Medicaid, Public Assistance, and related programs. The ACS team will be responsible for designing, developing, implementing, enhancing, and maintaining a Data Warehouse System that will provide the framework for decision support, data mining, comparative analysis and reporting. Additionally, ACS will work closely with DMAHS staff to ensure that all users and support staff are fully trained in the use of the new system.

"This award demonstrates ACS' impressive innovations within the industry," said Harvey V. Braswell, president of ACS Government Services. "We are looking forward to the opportunity to further raise the standard by which the industry is defined and to continue to be a trendsetter in the DW/DSS industry."

Douglas McGruther, Chief Information Officer for New Jersey's Department of Human Services said, "We look forward to working closely with the ACS team to create one of the most comprehensive Health and Human Services data warehouses ever conceived. Because this system will allow us to manage all of our programs more efficiently, we will greatly improve our ability to deliver services to our beneficiaries. The benefits will be enormous." Mr. McGruther continued, "As we have tried to determine how to build this system, we have worked closely with the federal government and industry leaders. As a result, we feel confident that the system we have designed is the solution to our information needs and that ACS is the right company to implement this ambitious project."

ACS is a Fortune 1000 company comprised of nearly 22,000 people in 23 countries providing business process and technology outsourcing solutions to world-class commercial and government clients. ACS makes technology work for our clients. Visit ACS on the Internet at www.acs-inc.com.

SPSS Enabling Technologies Division/Azerity Form Alliance

SPSS Inc's Enabling Technologies Division (ETD) and Azerity, a leader in sell-side e-business software solutions, announced a strategic partnership that will significantly enhance the analytical capabilities of Azerity's ProChannel solutions suite. The partnership enables manufacturers in complex industries like high technology the ability to quickly and dynamically access and analyze leading indicators for their business resulting in more accurate forecasts and inventory allocation. Azerity will integrate advanced SPSS Web-based analytics, including key performance indicators and forecasting, into its collaborative sales solution, ProChannel. The integration will give high technology manufacturers a unique and powerful customer relationship management (CRM) solution that leverages daily activity to formulate long term strategies.

Azerity's ProChannel offers manufacturers and their selling communities real-time market intelligence, end-to-end control of the sales process and fast accurate execution of transactions. The alliance of the two award-winning companies will enable customers to analyze the sell-side transactional data captured by ProChannel to provide a deeper understanding of the activities across their multiple sales channels.

"Our agreement with SPSS provides the next step in the evolution of our ProChannel solution, said Stephen Gold, president and CEO of Azerity. "For the first time, manufacturers will have total visibility into all transactional activity affecting company-wide sales, and the ability to forecast future performance based on both leading and lagging indicators. With this strategic alliance, we extend ProChannel's capabilities to senior management, providing the analytical tools they need to make the best decisions for their companies."

"We are very pleased to be joining forces with Azerity and to help provide its clients with analytical tools that more quickly identify a wide variety of business opportunities" said David Blyer, president of SPSS ETD.

The integration of SPSS analytical solutions into the ProChannel suite will provide end users with new levels of insight into capsulated data, enabling them to better recognize business trends and respond rapidly, while at the same time develop more accurate forecasts. The result is a turnkey product with built-in flexibility and extendibility that can be tailored to the needs of clients.

"In these difficult economic times, smart companies are those that are recognizing the enormous value of capitalizing on the huge amount of information that exists on the sales side," said Stephen Purkiss, SPSS ETD vice president of sales and business development for cross industries. "With the implementation of Azerity's enhanced analytical capabilities, clients will be able to recognize issues and opportunities earlier, investigate the cause and effects and make timely decisions that have a significant business impact."

About the SPSS Enabling Technologies Division

The SPSS Enabling Technologies Division (SPSS ETD), headquartered in Miami, Fla., provides the company's analytical and predictive technologies to leading independent software vendors and solutions providers through strategic partnerships.

SPSS ETD integrates advanced analytical and predictive technologies, data visualization, data warehousing, and industry-specific business intelligence expertise to deliver customized analytical solutions that allow organizations to solve tangible business problems. Through its pioneering technology, DiscoverIt, SPSS Enabling Technologies Division provides a comprehensive Web-enabled framework that embeds analytical technologies and solutions into the infrastructure of organizations in key vertical and cross-industry markets, including telecommunications, healthcare, finance, retail, customer relationship management, and BI.

For more information about SPSS Enabling Technologies Division and partnering opportunities, please visit www.spss.com/embed.

About Azerity

Azerity, an evolution of Intelic Software, is a sell-side e-business software provider that enables manufacturers to create a highly efficient sales environment, dramatically increasing sales throughput by synchronizing complex business processes across and between the entire selling chain.

Founded in 1998, the company developed its ProChannel solution for manufacturers and their selling communities, offering real-time market intelligence, end-to-end control of the sales process, and fast, accurate execution of transactions.

Since then, ProChannel has become the industry standard at top-tier manufacturers with proven performance, a definable return on investment, and unsurpassed user satisfaction. In 2001, Intelic Software became Azerity, a name change designed to reflect the magnitude of growth that has occurred in sell-side automation, Internet adoption, and Azerity's role as a market leader for collaborative sales solutions. For additional information about Azerity, visit www.azerity.com.

Contact SPSS Enabling Technologies Division, Sylvia Gastelbondo, 305-627-5700.

Sagent, Bridge Medical in 3-yr OEM Pact

Sagent, a leading provider of business intelligence solutions, announced that Bridge Medical Inc, a technologies and services company that offers hospitals a suite of cost-effective software applications designed to improve medication safety and drug therapy outcomes, signed a three-year oem agreement that allows Bridge Medical to integrate the powerful and scalable Sagent Solution into its innovative clinical data warehouse and clinical decision support tools.

With the integration of the Sagent Solution into Bridge Medical's product offerings, it will be easy for Bridge to aggregate data to provide hospitals with a unique perspective of the data--data that combines clinical and financial information to support the hospital in optimizing therapeutic outcomes and operational efficiencies. Examples of the benefits that can be derived with the combined Bridge-Sagent solution include assisting physicians, nurses and pharmacists in complying with ORYX indicators, tracking adherence to guidelines and protocols, and comparing data between hospitals. Delivering a more comprehensive view of available patient information and making that information more accessible for real-time monitoring achieve these results.

The open and complete Sagent Solution received a superior grade from Bridge Medical's technical team for its ease-of-use and quick implementation, and was selected as a partner from among other industry leading business intelligence development tools for Bridge's project.

"After thoroughly reviewing products from a variety of vendors, Sagent won hands down," said Rusty Lewis, COO, Bridge Medical. "Their development tools are easy to use, and we felt that we could get our project up and running much sooner with the Sagent Solution. In addition, their massively parallel architecture enables us to provide scalable solutions to fit the needs of a variety of customers ranging from individual departments all the way up to full-blown enterprise data warehouses. We are extremely excited about the capabilities that Sagent brings to our customers."

"We are delighted to have Bridge Medical select Sagent as the platform for building their clinical data warehouse solution," said Larry Scroggins, senior vice president, business development, Sagent. "This is yet another example of how a partner values our development tools to enable them to go to market quickly. This partnership, coupled with our superior performance, will enable Bridge to invest in their application expertise without having to be challenged by integration issues."

About Bridge Medical

Bridge Medical Inc, headquartered in Solana Beach, Calif., was founded in 1996 to help health care providers eliminate medication errors, reduce adverse drug events, and improve medication therapy e outcomes. The Bridge MedPoint system, introduced in 1999, uses bar code scanning, wireless networking and innovative integrated software programs and expert clinical knowledge bases to help hospitals prevent medication, specimen identification, and blood transfusion errors at the point of care. For more information about Bridge and the Bridge MedPoint system, access www.bridgemedical.com. For more information about the problem of medication errors, continuing education programs or Beyond Blame, Bridge's award-winning documentary, access Bridge's educational site at www.mederrors.com.

About Sagent

Sagent's suite of Business Intelligence solutions enables companies to measurably impact their business by implementing highly successful customer relationship and financial management initiatives. Through Sagent's powerful enabling technologies, organizations can easily and rapidly turn company data into relevant information that can be used for effective decision-making, analysis and reporting. Information can be extracted from multiple sources (internal and external), optimized for decision support and delivered in a customized format for Web-based or client applications. Even the most complex analytic application can be developed in weeks, not months.

More than 1,500 companies have selected Sagent software to enhance customer retention, cross-sell/up-sell, improve customer service, increase efficiencies of marketing campaigns, streamline business operations, analyze financials, and reduce costs. Customers include AT&T, BP Amoco, Boeing Employees Credit Union, Bristol Meyers, British Telecom, California State Automobile Association, Citibank, GPU Energy, Hughes Aircraft Employees Federal Credit Union, Johnson & Johnson (UK), Kemper National Insurance, Provident Central Credit Union, Safeway and Siemens. Sagent retains strategic relationships with partners such as Advent Software, Commerce One, Compaq, EDS, IBM, Microsoft, NEC, SAS and Sun Microsystems. Sagent is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and can be reached at www.sagent.com.

Contact Sagent, Mountain View, Lisa Bergamo, 650-815-3351, lbergamo@sagent.com.

WhiteCross and Brightbox Partner

WhiteCross Systems announced a strategic partnership with Brightbox to deliver analytically enhanced direct and brand marketing services to their shared customers. WhiteCross' detailed Web analytics service will be available as part of Brightbox's customized marketing solutions, offering Internet companies customer-centric technology and programs to increase customer retention and acquisition through personalized relationship marketing campaigns.

Brightbox is a marketing agency that focuses on the creation of "Two-Way" or interactive customer solutions through the application of digital Internet technology and one-to-one direct marketing techniques. Using its shared branding and direct marketing experience, Brightbox delivers communication concepts, which build stronger and more meaningful customer relationships.

WhiteCross is a provider of outsourced analytical and reporting services to media and telecommunications companies. WhiteCross' services are focused on assisting senior management in understanding the needs of their customers in on-line and offline environments. Executives are given a view of their customer's behavior in relation to their products and services to enable them to change program, product, and price variables. These changes will improve response rates and increase profit contribution, providing managers with more opportunity to proactively manage their franchises.

"By partnering with WhiteCross we are able to offer our clients more detailed information about their customers' activities across all contact points," said Paul Middlebrook, Client Director of Brightbox. "We always impress on our clients that communicating with their customers needs to be done on an individual basis and WhiteCross offers the only solution that is capable of analyzing customer interaction and response data at this level and in such depth."

Both WhiteCross and Brightbox provide tailored solutions for every client. Each assigns experienced consultants to work directly with clients on specific projects and encourages the clients to utilize the solutions throughout the organization, not just within a single department, in order for the client to get the most out of the knowledge available on their customers.

"Brightbox solutions complement our data analytics services very well. We have the same goal of increasing customer loyalty through the collection and analysis of data from every customer contact point, so that a client knows who its customers are, how they behave and what services they use, want and have come to expect," said John Thompson, vice president of worldwide marketing, WhiteCross Systems. "Through this partnership, we can deliver a combination of proven marketing programs and analytical capabilities to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the marketing programs and determine how to implement improvements either at the end of a predetermined cycle or during program execution, or a mix of both."

This relationship with Brightbox, and the recently announced relationship with Enterprise Marketing Solutions Inc (EMSi), is the realization of the stated direction by WhiteCross to augment the WhiteCross approach to delivering analytical services. WhiteCross is focused on delivering customized marketing measurement and analysis systems for use by executives. WhiteCross' partners are focused on helping those executives and their managers to implement an overall strategic plan and supporting marketing tactics and programs. The three parts of the cycle (planning, implementing and measuring) work together to provide a self-refining marketing cycle.

About Brightbox

Brightbox is a marketing consultancy focusing on delivering strategic and creative solutions that increase profit through "one to one" marketing, primarily focused on digital technology and the Internet.

It offers:

• Website and two-way marketing evaluation
• Consultancy in development of e-business strategies
• Relationship marketing consultancy
• Implementation and execution of customer loyalty schemes
• Customer experience user labs for website evaluation
• e-marketing and collaborative marketing campaign development
• Data mining and predictive modeling
• Consultancy on personalization technologies and strategies
• Creative campaign and website development for Two-way marketing

About WhiteCross

WhiteCross Systems is a leading provider of business and customer intelligence solutions. WhiteCross provides critical infrastructure services for companies interested in receiving timely and customized data analysis in order to strengthen customer relationships, as well as managing the health and outlook of their businesses. The outsourced services include automated, tailored and supported data feeds for line-of-business executives; and reporting and analytical CRM applications that enable organizations to make more informed decisions. WhiteCross' reporting and analytical technology, partnered with its consulting services help companies increase revenue, earnings and profits, while cutting costs on internal IT operations. The company specializes in providing its technology, expertise and actionable insights to premier media, e-business, telco and IP Services companies. WhiteCross Systems has headquarters in San Francisco, Calif., USA; and Bracknell, Berkshire, United Kingdom. For more information, visit the WhiteCross Systems Website www.whitecross.com.

Contact Emily Hampton, emily@sparkcomms.co.uk, of Spark Marketing Communications, +44-207-202-8490, for WhiteCross.

AIR Technology Supports Trinom Ltd Securitization

Applied Insurance Research Inc (AIR) has applied two of its most innovative modeling technologies to the securitization of catastrophe risk. The Boston-based catastrophe modeling firm provided the risk analysis in support of the recently completed Trinom Ltd transaction, which raised $161.8 million of coverage for Zurich Insurance Company's underlying insurance risk from US hurricane, US earthquake and European windstorm. In performing the analysis, AIR has delivered to Zurich and Trinom investors results based on Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) technology for the modeling of European windstorms and the Advanced Component Method (ACM) for earthquake damage estimation.

"Traditional parameterized models simply cannot capture the complexity of European extratropical cyclones," said Dr. John Keller, senior research scientist in meteorology at AIR. Parameterized models typically employ a limited set of variables to characterize storms systems, such as lowest central pressure and a well-defined storm track. "Extratropical cyclones are very different from their tropical counterpart, hurricanes," explained Dr. Keller; "European storms exhibit multiple areas of relatively low and high pressure, the locations of which can change quickly and frequently. Only through NWP can such complexity be modeled realistically."

Another innovation in the transaction is AIR's ACM, which models buildings as complex configurations of individual structural and non-structural components, each of which responds uniquely to the natural resonance between the building and incoming seismic waves. "ACM is a rigorous, engineering-based technology," said Dr. Nozar G. Kishi, director of engineering research and analysis at AIR, "which leads to a more objective assessment of overall building damageability and contributes to a more accurate estimation of modeled earthquake losses in this transaction."

Under the three-year arrangement, which was brokered by Aon Capital Markets and Morgan Stanley, recovery is triggered by AIR's estimation of losses to a notional portfolio resulting from qualifying hurricane, windstorm and earthquake events. The A-1 Notes received a rating of Ba2 from Moody's, BB from Standard & Poor and BB- from Fitch. The A-2 Notes received a Ba1 from Moody's, BB+ from Standard & Poor and BB from Fitch.

Applied Insurance Research is the technological leader in providing catastrophe modeling services and computer software solutions (CLASIC/2, CATRADER and CATMAP/2) to the insurance, reinsurance and capital markets. AIR's models simulate losses from natural catastrophes such as hurricanes, hail, tornadoes, other windstorms, flood and earthquakes in over 30 countries. Offices are located in Boston, London, Seattle, Hyderabad and San Francisco. The company's Web address is www.air-worldwide.com.

Contact AIR Inc, Wendy Lavin-Schilling, 425-467-0477.